Thomas Trutschel/ Photothek is pictured.
Microsoft is starting the year with bugs from Y2K. Bleeping Computer reported that the company has released a fix for a bug that broke email delivery on New Year's Day. Exchange was trying to store version date checks in a 32-bit variable, which was a big problem when the date from January 1st, 2022 onward was too large. Email was stuck in a queue because of the crash of the malware engine.
The emergency fix uses a script to pause two services, replace the older engine files with newer ones that use a new number sequence, and restart operations. The fix requires manual input and could take a long time to implement for larger companies, but an automatic solution is in development.
Exchange customers shouldn't be affected by this. The holiday weekend likely limited the demand for email. It's not clear why Microsoft didn't anticipate a date issue with the software that was released a few years ago. This is a clear lesson about anticipating date bugs.
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